Jules Howard and Gavin Scott introduce MEGA: The Most Enormous Animals Ever
About Author
Jules Howard is a zoology correspondent, author, science-writer and broadcaster who appears regularly on TV and radio, including Newsround and BBC Radio 5 Live. Jules's non-fiction books include The Who, What, Why of Zoology, Respect the Insect and the Encyclopedia of Animals.
Gavin Scott studied Natural History Illustration and works in character design and children's illustration. He grew up in Dorset but now lives with his family in Somerset. When he's not working, he loves being on two wheels, and enjoys rock pooling and fossil hunting with his children.
Interview
Jules Howard and Gavin Scott introduce MEGA: The Most Enormous Animals Ever (Nosy Crow)
February 2025
Discover the most enormous animals from the past, and today, and find out how they each helped shape their environment - and learn what we risk losing if today's mega animals are driven to extinction!
Whale-sized lizards? Mega-mouthed sharks? Monstrous orangutan-like apes? Find out from author and presenter Jules Howard and illustrator Gavin Scott as they introduce MEGA: The Most Enormous Animals Ever.
Extract from MEGA. Review: "This book will have children gripped and engaged as they discover the biggest animals on earth."
Q&A with Jules Howard and Gavin Scott
"MEGA was a way to explore, celebrate and value the largest animals on Earth -
because they might not be around forever!"
1. Can you tell us a little about yourselves, your work, and what brought you to creating the incredible Mega: The Most Enormous Animals Ever?
Jules: I'm a zoologist, presenter and author. The inspiration for this book? Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of thousands of young people, talking about animals, evolution and (my favourite topic) fossils! Listening to the kinds of questions that young people ask, it's clear that BIG animals have their own special magic in our lives. When you look at the fossil history of animals on our planet, you can see clearly that eras like ours, when big animals are everywhere, aren't guaranteed. For us, MEGA was a way to explore, celebrate and value the largest animals on Earth - because they might not be around forever!
Gavin: When I was little I was fascinated by nature and I spent a lot of my childhood drawing and painting animals. After I finished school I went to art college to study Natural History Illustration. I eventually ended up becoming an illustrator and I've worked with the publisher, Nosy Crow, creating the artwork for several books including Everything You Know About Dinosaurs Is Wrong. My illustration style sits somewhere between fiction and non-fiction so I really thought I could bring something a bit different to the book and to make it stand out.
2. What will children learn about in Mega, and why are you focusing on 'big' creatures? What do you hope your readers will take from the book?
Jules: Like us, megafauna are big-brained, intelligent and often very social, so we humans relate to them pretty well. But giant animals can also be unnerving, exciting and thrilling. And like us, megafauna such as elephants, rhinos and whales shape their ecosystems and our world - a single water-filled elephant footprint can become home to dozens of aquatic insects, for instance. And so, a lot of footprints influences a LOT of life-forms. And that's just footprints, not to mention what elephants eat or the life-giving power of their droppings! (We'll not go there… but you get the idea).
We also wanted to explain with MEGA how lucky we are to share our world with these extraordinarily evolved organisms - how they live and breathe in bodies that are so enormous and, importantly, how sorely we'd miss them if they were gone. So there is an underlying environmental message to the book, which you'll see ringing across its colourful chapters.
Gavin: Well, it was books like this that made me want to become an illustrator so I hope a few children are inspired to do the same. Or to become the scientists, environmentalists and zoologists who are doing their best to look after our megafauna and the planet in general, because a lot of the animals alive today are in real trouble.
3. How is the book arranged, and what periods in evolution are covered? Do you expect readers to dip into it, or read it cover to cover? Do you have a favourite section?
Jules: Gavin's gorgeous illustrations, his wonderful scenes filled with life and colours, also expertly get across the size and perspectives of large animals. That was really important for us with this book. We wanted it to be so that every spread, opened at random by young people, could be enjoyed without having seen the spreads before or after.
That's one of the beautiful things about the book - each page is its own unique package of megafaunal 'WOW'. There are themed sections covering each animal group (mammals, reptiles etc.) and each group of animals we explore (big cats, for example) has its own 'BIGGEST EVER' spread and a complementary spread that charts the four largest species of its group today (so … tiger, lion, jaguar, cougar!).
Gavin: My favourite section is really difficult to choose. I love the Whales and Dolphins chapter. It doesn't get much more MEGA than whales! I had a lot of fun creating those images and I became totally absorbed in the work which is always a good sign. The Sperm Whales catching squid was one of my favourite spreads. I knew I wanted to show their size, but I also wanted to make that baby sperm whale a little bit cute. Hopefully, I got the right balance.
The illustration of the Paraceratherium in the Even Toed Ungulates section was amazing to draw too as it was one of the animals I remember drawing as a kid. I had an illustration of one in my prehistoric animals book and I couldn't believe just how big it was! I've always had a real interest in reptiles too, so that section was great to work on. I think reptiles are some of the trickiest animals to draw and paint, so it felt like quite a challenge. I think it's something about the scales and the iridescence of their skin.
4. How did you decide which creatures to include? Was there space for everything you wanted to mention?
Jules: To me, writing a book like this is like setting up a mobile, hand-held museum. Each spread is a 'gallery' in that 'museum' and the animals chosen should entertain, amaze and help readers understand more about biology and the way that this incredible science of zoology works. This is especially exciting when it comes to megafauna, who add their own gravity to things.
When choosing animals for a spread, I work to a general principle: for every well-known animal such as a giraffe or blue whale that I include, I'll select a little-known animal with the same power to amaze and inspire. For example, this book tells stories of giant manatee-like animals, such as the extinct Steller's Sea Cow, and extinct armoured squid-like molluscs with shells seven or more metres long.
You won't find many other books detailing the lives of incredible megafauna like these, but I know that many kids (especially) want to be experts in something that others know very little about, so it works well. I see that as an important part of my job as a writer: to widen the concept of what animals represent and tell new and unique stories of their lives and incredible evolutionary journeys.
Gavin: As the illustrator, I was briefed on which animals I needed to create. The main problem I faced was trying to fit the text around the animals, as they took up quite a lot of room on the page. Sometimes, I had to alter an animal's position or flip an image over to allow the best placement of text. I knew I wanted to make the animals as large as possible on the pages to create real impact, so fitting the text in was often a bit of a head scratcher! I really enjoy trying to solve that part of the puzzle though, it's really fun.
5. How did you go about researching the facts about these enormous creatures for the book?
Jules: It took a long time, particularly since there is lots of debate about the true sizes of some animals. Blue whales are a classic. It used to be, 100 or so years ago, that blue whales were measured and weighed by being cut up (by whalers) into smaller pieces which were then added together. These whalers liked to exaggerate their discoveries, which happens a lot with large animals, and these needed unpicking during my research. Nowadays, science is more rigorous, thankfully. To get everything correct in this book took months of proper scientific research, across hundreds of scientific journals. It was its own EPIC ordeal but definitely worth it.
Gavin: I like to do most of the picture research myself, although reference from the publisher is really helpful too. It's useful to see how other artists and illustrators have drawn and painted the animals as well, but I never want to be too influenced by those and I try to go down my own route. The wildlife artist Robert Bateman was somebody that really influenced my work when I was younger, and his work was definitely in the back of my mind during the process of illustrating MEGA, especially with regards to composition and atmosphere.
6. What were the challenges in creating the images for the book, given that many of these mega creatures have never been seen?
Gavin: Some of the animals have very little in the way of fossil record, so I had to look at their living relatives for some help. The big Paraceratherium (biggest extinct even toed ungulate) needed to be running, so I looked at photos of modern-day Rhinos, which are their closest living relatives. Their anatomy is fairly similar so that really helped. It was sort of a very long-legged, long-necked Rhino!
The animals also needed to be in the correct habitat and behaving in a natural way, so that had to be researched too. Also, the types of plants and trees need to be correct or as close as possible. I like to be as accurate as I can!
For some of the extinct animals it's a lot of guess work. For instance, the largest ape that has ever existed, Gigantopithecus, is only known from a jawbone and teeth. It's not like there are loads of complete Gigantopithecus skeletons lying around or anything! Scientists know a lot from those fossil fragments but there's a fair bit of speculation.
7. What are some of the most awe-inspiring mega creatures that you came across? Were there any that especially surprised you?
Jules: Whale-sized lizards? Mega-mouthed sharks? Camels that were like mammoths? Monstrous orangutan-like apes? Too many to name! It's funny, you mention 'awe' but I've talked for years about how amazing it is that that right now, a hungry sperm whale (at 15 metres or more) is probably at the bottom of the sea fighting with a terrified giant squid (10 metres or more). That really is statistically likely to be happening somewhere in the deep ocean, as you read these words. And so, with this in mind, it was especially amazing to see Gavin bring this strange thought to life in the book. I've always wanted to see what this epic battle might look like and Gavin, in trademark style, delivers!
Gavin: I'd never really thought about what the largest fish was. I mean, we all know that sharks are big and that whale sharks are VERY big, but they are fish with cartilage. What about the largest fish with bones? That was really good to learn about.
Another example is Gigantopithicus. They're sometimes portrayed as terrifying King Kong-like monsters but they would have been gentle giants eating fruit and berries. I decided to add in some butterflies, and have the animal looking at them, as if deep in thought. This helped to give a sense of scale but it also hopefully hints at how gentle and intelligent these animals would most likely have been.
8. There's a surprise in the cover, too, can you tell us about that?
Gavin: Ha, yes! The dust jacket doubles as a huge fold out poster of an Asian Straight Tusked Elephant, the largest elephant ever! It's an illustration taken from inside the book of an elephant crashing through the forest. It was the very first image I created for MEGA, so I was very much still getting a feel for the rest of the book when I drew that one. Removing the dust jacket also reveals a different front cover underneath, which I really love!
9. If you could (briefly!) step back in time to see any of this history and creatures, where would you want to travel to?
Jules: Oof, what a question! It would be a three-way tie between having a field trip to the final day of the age of large dinosaurs, complete with meteorite lightshow; seeing and then mourning the death of the last megalodon, the largest ever shark (18 metres); or… a quick pop back a few centuries for a daring rescue mission to round-up and put into care the last of the dodos. Can I have all three?
Gavin: This might sound a bit of a cliché but it would probably be the Cretaceous period. Just to see huge Sauropod dinosaurs roaming around, and carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex would be incredible. I'd have to have some sort of invisibility cloak though (can you tell that I've thought about this quite a bit?!).
Also, maybe South East Asia to see Gigantopithecus. Illustrating extinct animals is a lot of guess work and I remember thinking 'did this animal really look like this?', so it would be good to know what they looked like for sure! What was the colour of their fur? Were their faces like an Orang-utans, or more like other apes? Or neither?! Maybe one day we'll know more.
10. What about our world today? Which species and which part of the planet do you most want to visit or that help to inspire you in your work?
Jules: I definitely have some zoological itches to scratch! I've never been to South America so the rainforest is calling. And Africa too. Having written a lot about wildebeest in MEGA, I'd love to see their million-strong grassland migrations and watch them run the gauntlet through rivers filled with hungry crocodiles! What a sight to behold!
Gavin: Sharks are beautiful but they scare me, and I know they shouldn't. l can only really blame that on watching Jaws as a kid, although it is a great film! They are incredible creatures and so to overcome my fear I would love to dive with sharks at some point. I think that would cure me!
MEGA: The Most Enormous Animals Ever
